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As a favor to struggling Americans, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed a federal budget last week ravaging programs for the poor, elderly, disabled, young, veterans, jobless, students and other vulnerable people. Ryan did it, he said, because these programs, food stamps, health insurance, Pell grants, veteran’s hospitals and the like are demeaning.

Yes, demeaning.

So Ryan plunders them and gives the savings to the rich in the form of additional tax breaks.  Half of the savings in Ryan’s budget come from destroying health insurance programs. That would cost tens of millions of Americans their coverage.

Uninsured and underinsured toddlers, injured veterans, and disabled workers may die from some curable disease as a result. But at least Ryan will save those people from being demeaned!

That Ryan, what a guy, huh? Arranging for the nation’s well off to shirk responsibility to the vulnerable – then calling it kindness.

Ryan offered up the sequel to last year’s failed country club conservative budget and explained that he purged programs for the hapless because a social safety net:

“. . . lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives. It’s demeaning.”

Oh. That’s the demeaning thing! It isn’t being so poor that health insurance is unaffordable, getting emergency treatment for a broken hip, then being hounded by hospital bill collectors while still in a body cast and unable to work. It wouldn’t be watching your mother die in unbearable pain of a treatable cancer because she couldn’t afford health insurance. It wouldn’t be realizing your child may die because you lost your job and with it your health insurance during the Wall Street-caused recession, then discovered your baby suffers a rare heart disease that’s treatable for those with insurance, but fatal for those without because they can’t afford the medications.

No. The really demeaning thing according to the GOP is the social safety net that provides health insurance to the impoverished, to children, to veterans, to the disabled and to the elderly.

The Ryan health de-insurance plan would smack down Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), care for veterans and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Ryan announced his intent to repeal the Affordable Care Act just days before the second anniversary of the law that has provided coverage for 2.5 million young adults up to age 26 on their parents’ plans; has forbidden insurers from denying coverage for children with pre-existing conditions, and has banned the insurance company practice of cancelling coverage when policy holders got sick.

Ryan wants to repeal the law rather than wait for a decision on its constitutionality from the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear arguments this week from country club conservative state attorneys general who want the justices to overturn the landmark measure before it can provide coverage to 33 million uninsured Americans. Because, of course, getting that insurance would be demeaning for those people.

Ryan proposes to repeal the law while providing absolutely no alternative — no plan to cover the uninsured, no plan to close the Medicare donut hole, no plan to make sure insurers don’t re-institute lifetime limits, no plan to stop insurers from once again cancelling coverage when policy holders get sick. Because, of course, providing those protections would be demeaning.

Ryan also would slash by 45 percent federal funding for Medicaid and other health plans for low-income people including the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Last year, the Urban Institute estimated that a similar Ryan proposal to cut Medicaid and convert it to a block grant program administered by the states would strip coverage from as many as 27 million low-income Americans within a decade. Because, of course, denying coverage to impoverished children would ensure the federal government did not demean five-year-olds with life-threatening asthma and sickle cell anemia. (more…)

Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom couldn’t have said it better — or worse. When asked by CNN Wednesday morning whether Mitt was being pushed so far to the right by Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich that he’d be handicapped in the general election, Fehrnstrom said “you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch-A-Sketch. You kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

An Etch-A-Sketch, for those of you under twenty, is a thick flat gray screen that comes in a plastic frame with two knobs on the front in the lower corners — one left, one right. Twisting the knobs changes the aluminum powder on the back of the screen, creating completely new images. If you twist the left knob, you alter the powder horizontially; twist the right nob, and you alter it vertically.

Remind you of anyone?

When Mitt ran for governor of Massachusetts he twisted the left knob, moving horizontally to the left. (I know first hand because I ran in the Democratic primary that year.) He became a social liberal, tolerant of abortion and willing to entertain the idea that gays and lesbians should be able to form civil unions. He was also an economic moderate interested in seeking ways to expand health-care coverage.

But ever since Mitt left the governor’s office, he’s been twisting the right nob, moving downward into the muck of regressive Republicanism in pursuit of the Republican nomination.

Etch-A-Sketch was introduced in 1959 near the peak of the baby boom. (It was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998, and in 2003 the Toy Industry Association named it one of the hundred most memorable toys of the twentieth century.)

But Etch-A-Sketch has been replaced by digital toys that have the capacity to play and replay videos. These new video toys aren’t just for kids. Almost every voting adult has one, or has easy access to one. (more…)

Gas prices continue to rise, which is finally giving Republicans an issue. Mitt Romney is demanding the President open up more domestic drilling; the super PAC behind Rick Santorum just released a new ad in Louisiana blasting the President on gas prices; and the GOP is attacking the White House on the Keystone XL Pipeline.

But the rise in gas prices has almost nothing to do with energy policy. It has everything to do with America’s continuing failure to adequately regulate Wall Street. But don’t hold your breath waiting for Republicans to tell the truth.

As I’ve noted before, oil supplies aren’t being squeezed. Over 80 percent of America’s energy needs are now being satisfied by domestic supplies. In fact, we’re starting to become an energy exporter. Demand for oil isn’t rising in any event. Demand is down in the U.S. compared to last year at this time, and global demand is still moderate given the economic slowdowns in Europe and China.

But Wall Street is betting on higher oil prices in the future — and that betting is causing prices to rise. The Street is laying odds that unrest in Syria will spill over into other countries or that tensions with Iran will affect the Persian Gulf, and that global demand will pick up as American consumers bounce back to life.

These bets are pushing up oil prices because Wall Street firms and other big financial players now dominate oil trading.

Financial speculators historically accounted for about 30 percent of oil contracts, producers and end users for about 70 percent. But today speculators account for 64 percent of all contracts.

Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — the federal agency that regulates trading in oil futures, among other commodities — warns that too few financial players control too much of the oil market. This allows them to push oil prices higher and higher — not only on the basis of their expectations about the future but also expectations about how high other speculators will drive the price.

In other words, a relatively few players with very deep pockets are placing huge bets on oil — and you’re paying. (more…)

Republican Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney loves everything about Michigan, the height of its trees, its lakes, its cars. Or is he just saying that?

A pattern has emerged in the Republican primaries, Romney wins among Republican voters with six-figure incomes and loses among Republican voters with five-figure incomes.

We have a class war, and it’s inside the Republican Party.

What has happened? What is it about Romney that has split Republicans along class lines? Does it mean Romney will struggle with working-class voters in November?

We can only conclude so much from exit polls and a few person-on-the-street quotes. Let’s not forget that many pundits thought Barack Obama couldn’t compete for working-class votes after his poor bowling outing preceded his drubbing in the 2008 Pennsylvania primary. Yet Obama won the Rust Belt in 2008, including Pennsylvania.

But there are two clear reasons why Romney is struggling now, and if those problems persisted, they not only portend trouble for Romney’s candidacy, but for the future of conservatism.

1. Romney comes across like an out-of-touch Richie Rich.

You wouldn’t think that being enormously wealthy, paying little in taxes and constantly saying insensitive things about his fortune and others’ misfortune would be a problem in a Republican primary. But we are being reminded that not everyone Republican voter is in Romney’s class.

Many conservatives recoiled when Newt Gingrich’s Super PAC hammered Romney’s track record running Bain Capital during the South Carolina primary. But those voters live 750 miles from Wall Street, and they voted for Newt.

There is mistrust of Wall Street-style finance that cuts across ideology, and Romney hasn’t done anything to overcome it.

Obviously, working class people support wealthy politicians all the time. But usually there is an attempt not just to sound sympathetic to the struggles of others, but have at least a wisp of a policy agenda that speaks to those struggles. (more…)

The longer the Republican presidential contest drags on, the more uncomfortable Mitt Romney seems around blue-collar Americans, and the more antagonistic Rick Santorum seems toward America’s professionals, current and aspiring, and their ideals. This does not portend Republican success in November, whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s primaries in Arizona and Michigan.

Romney’s stabs at seeming a regular guy have provided the most painful moments of his campaign. How to come off as a car buff in Michigan? Mention your wife’s Cadillacs. How to be a good ol’ boy at Daytona? Say you’re friends with some of the race car owners. Not since Richard Nixon has a national political leader appeared so excruciatingly ill at ease with the simplest public encounters.

The roots of Romney’s awkwardness are shrouded in mystery. Perhaps, while going door to door in France in quest of converts to Mormonism, he came to believe that encounters with ordinary folks were an ordeal with which God tests the faithful. Certainly, his career in private equity did nothing to prepare him for conversations with actual workers. A good leveraged-buyout operator — and Romney was one of the best — doesn’t sit down with workers to hear their concerns, lest he end up heeding any interest save those of the bottom line. Whatever the reason, Romney’s encounters with ordinary men and women seem fraught with peril and grow steadily more surreal.

Santorum, by contrast, seems comfortable only with ordinary guys, provided “ordinary” is defined as white, working-class, traditional, patriarchal, borderline theocratic and seething with resentment at everyone except the rich. Santorum is the latest right-wing demagogue who rails at the real and imagined sins of liberal cultural elites (joining Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace and Spiro Agnew, to name but a few), but in his zeal to damage Romney in Michigan, he has more effectively damaged himself throughout professional America.

Not since McCarthy decided to attack the U.S. Army for allegedly coddling communists has a reactionary populist been so wide of the mark as Santorum was in attacking President Obama as a “snob” for saying he would like more young people to go to college. “There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to the test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them,” Santorum said this weekend. “I understand why [Obama] wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.” (more…)

My father was a Republican for the first 78 years of his life. For the last twenty, he’s been a Democrat (he just celebrated his 98th.) What happened? “They lost me,” he says.

They’re losing even more Americans now, as the four remaining GOP candidates seek to outdo one another in their race for the votes of the loony right that’s taken over the Grand Old Party.

But the rest of us have reason to worry.

A party of birthers, creationists, theocrats, climate-change deniers, nativists, gay-bashers, anti-abortionists, media paranoids, anti-intellectuals, and out-of-touch country clubbers cannot govern America.

Yet even if they lose the presidency on Election Day they’re still likely to be in charge of at least one house of Congress as well as several state legislators and governorships. That’s a problem for the nation.

The GOP’s drift toward loopyness started in 1993 when Bill Clinton became the first Democrat in the White House in a dozen years — and promptly allowed gays in the military, pushed through the Brady handgun act, had the audacity to staff his administration with strong women and African-Americans, and gave Hillary the task of crafting a national health bill. Bill and Hillary were secular boomers with Ivy League credentials who thought government had a positive role to play in peoples’ lives. (more…)

Have you heard of William Dore, Foster Friess, Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, Peter Thiel, or Bruce Kovner? If not, let me introduce them to you. They’re running for the Republican nomination for president.

I know, I know. You think Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney are running. They are — but only because the people listed in the first paragraph have given them huge sums of money to do so. In a sense, Santorum, Gingrich, Paul, and Romney are the fronts. Dore et al. are the real investors.

According to January’s Federal Election Commission report, William Dore and Foster Friess supplied more than three-fourths of the $2.1 million raked in by Rick Santorum’s super PAC in January. Dore, president of the Dore Energy Corporation in Lake Charles, Louisiana, gave $1 million; Freis, a fund manager based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, gave $669,000 (he had given the Santorum super PAC $331,000 last year, bringing Freis’s total to $1 million).

Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam provided $10 million of the $11 million that went into Gingrich’s super PAC in January. Adelson is chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corporation. Texas billionaire Harold Simmons donated $500,000. (more…)

Four Republican Senators — Thune, Toomey, Hutchison, and Brown — held a press conference today, to remind Americans about their job creation legislation. Wait. Republicans have jobs bills? Oh! That’s why they had to remind us. Sen. John Thune, in the YouTube video below call on Sen. Harry Reid to stop blocking what he called bills “that deal with capital the issue of capital formation for our job creators.” Huh?

“Capital formation for our job creators?” Ooookay. What’s that mean? And what does it have to do with jobs? Thune goes on to explain, after telling us that the bills in question all passed with bipartisan support in the House, that these bills were “designed to help our small businesses create capital.”

Didja catch that? It happened so fast that if you blinked you may have missed it. Thirty-eight seconds into the video we’ve gone from job creation to “capital formation” to helping businesses “create capital.” At one minute and four seconds in, Thune explains that the bills in question are intended to “help our small businesses get access to the capital they need to create jobs.”

The bills in question are:

•S.1831 – Access to Capital for Job Creators Act: Thune’s bill would “direct the Securities and Exchange Commission to eliminate the prohibition against general solicitation as a requirement for a certain exemption under Regulation D.”
•S.1824 – Private Company Flexibility and Growth Act: Toomey’s bill would “amend the securities laws to establish certain thresholds for shareholder registration under that Act, and for other purposes.”
•S.18 – Small Business Paperwork Mandate Elimination Act: Brown’s bill would “repeal the expansion of information reporting requirements for payments of $600 or more to corporations and for other purposes.”
•S.556: Hutchison’s unnamed bill would: “amend the securities laws to establish certain thresholds for shareholder registration, and for other purposes.”
The Senators each go on to explain their bills, and why “capital formation” really is job creation. But Media Matters recently included Thune’s and Hutchison’s bills in a list of 27 Republican bills that aren’t about jobs. (more…)

First, Republicans opposed extending the payroll tax cut that put an extra $20 a week in the pockets of 160 million working Americans.

Next, they supported it. If the cost were offset the way they wanted. Even though Republicans previously had said that tax cuts never need be offset.

After that, they opposed a stopgap measure extending the break by two months. Even though the cost was offset.

Ultimately, they approved the 60-day extension.

Then, they opposed extending the tax cut another 10 months. Unless the cost were offset.

Finally, however, they supported that. Even though the cost was not, in fact, offset.

What’s that sound? It’s the frantic flailing of a grounded GOP fish: flip flop, flip flop, flip flop.

Republicans revel in casting themselves as the principled party. They claim they’re the moral majority. Their values, they contend, are unshakable. So their serial waffling on this issue is confusing. Against it; for it; against it; for it. Isn’t that what they ridiculed a Democratic Presidential candidate for?

There’s a simple explanation, however. Throughout this entire episode, Republicans never wavered or vacillated or faltered in any way in performing their most vital, their most basic function as a political party: pandering to the rich.

The thread running through this drama, from beginning to end, is Republican opposition to equitably taxing the rich. The GOP did whatever it took to prevent the nation’s millionaires and billionaires from parting with another cent. In the end, the party’s public image took a beating. But Congressional Republicans triumphed in shielding the nation’s richest from paying their fair share.

So focused are Republicans on providing welfare for the rich in the form of special tax  breaks and perks that initially the party didn’t support extending the payroll tax cut for the middle class at all. Late last November, party leaders, including U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, announced they opposed a one-year expansion.  Republicans said they’d allow a temporary tax cut for the middle class to expire, no problem, even though they’d previously contended they couldn’t end the supposedly temporary income tax cut Bush gave the rich because that would be a “tax increase,” and they could never support a tax increase. Not ever.

For Republicans, who are so true-blue to blue bloods, the real problem with extending the payroll tax cut for the middle class was that Democrats proposed paying for it with a small surtax on the nation’s wealthiest.

That confronted the GOP with a choice: side with the rich or go with the middle class. This was hardly a Sophie’s Choice, however. It was no difficult decision for the average American, say one of the 160 million for whom the extra $1,000 a year from the payroll tax break is meaningful.

Despite that, the GOP sided with 350,000 millionaires and billionaires. Republicans worked to ensure those millionaires and billionaires would not have to pay an additional amount insignificant to the 1 percent individually, but collectively substantial to the federal budget. (more…)